Dan Gordon’s Belfast shipyard’s play “The Boat Factory” hits New York

Playwright and actor Dan Gordon and Michael Condron tell the story of the Belfast shipyards in The Boat Factory.

When you consider how close the two communities in the North live to each other and how long they’ve fought, it’s a matter for wonder how little they actually know each other.

That means that Northern Irish actor and playwright Dan Gordon’s decision to write and star in a show about one of the most important aspects of Protestant history in the last century in the North is a show not to be missed.

Titled 'The Boat Factory,' Gordon’s new play is a love letter to the glory days of Belfast’s legendary shipbuilding industry. But he insists it’s not a whitewash or a sentimental portrait, he’s after the truth.

“I wrote this play to tell my kids about who my father was and the people around him were like and what they did,” Gordon tells the Irish Voice. “And hopefully I’ve captured that without getting too teary eyed.”

Gordon is best known to New York audiences for his dazzling turn as a Northern Irishman who gets swept up by the Republic of Ireland’s World Cup dream in Marie Jones’ Broadway hit 'A Night In November.'

It’s fair to say that Gordon’s community, the Northern Irish Protestant community, has never been great at selling themselves on the world stage.

“That siege mentality we had meant that we didn’t reach out before. We’re only now beginning to do it,” he says.

“The Ulster Scots Agency, Tourism Ireland and the Northern Ireland Bureau have all seen the opportunity to engage the wider world, with this play and the history behind it. That’s why I started rehearsing it on the Newtownards Road.”

That road, if you remember, was the recent ground zero of the so-called flag protests, where tensions erupted after Belfast City Council voted to limit the number of days the union flag was flown above City Hall from 365 to 18. Gordon’s decision to rehearse his play at the flashpoint was an invitation to his own community to reflect on their past and their future.

“I wanted to help give a voice to the Northern Irish people that’s not about the Ulster Volunteer Force or about where we came from,” Gordon explains.

Into that process he injects a fair degree of common sense, in particular when it comes to his play about the shipyards.

“If they built the Harland & Wolff shipyard in Rome it would have been full of Catholics,” he says. “But they built it in East Belfast and so there’s a very good reason why it wasn’t.”

Gordon’s efforts to engage his own community in dialogue recall the work of Derry’s Field Day Theatre Company in the 1980s. Their mission statement was to examine Irish history and the national question from a broadly Nationalist perspective. In his own way Gordon’s been doing that from a Protestant perspective for years himself.

“I want to show my community who they are, where they come from and the warts too. 'The Boat Factory' is a warts and all portrait,” he says.

“Nationalists have a tradition of performance and celebrating and partying, but we have a tradition of bolting the front door and saying if anyone comes near us we’ll shoot them.”

So in one sense 'The Boat Factory' is part of a larger project to open the Northern Irish Protestant experience up to the world in a new way.

“I want to do it with humor too, to diffuse the tension,” Gordon says.

For a century, to grow up in Belfast has meant growing up in the shadow of the giant yellow Harland & Wolff’s cranes in the city’s shipyard. And despite what some might have you believe, the Titanic was not the only ship ever built there.

In fact over 1,700 ships were built and 35,000 men were employed at its height, making it the biggest and best shipyard in the world in its heyday, which is now long passed.

But it’s a past worth remembering Gordon believes, because for more than a century it dominated the North’s economy. In this centenary year of the Titanic’s sinking that’s a legacy still to be grappled with.

Performing alongside fellow actor Michael Condron, Gordon conjures up a host of colorful characters from the glory days in a play that’s poignant, funny and moving.

“I’ve lived in the shadow of those big yellow cranes all my life, and I wanted to tell their story because they are so much a part of me. My father and my grandfather worked there and I never really got to talk to them about the experience. So I wrote the play,” Gordon says.

One of the evocative places the play has been staged in is at the multimillion-pound new Titanic Museum in Belfast.

“The play isn’t about the Titanic, although it’s referenced in it,” Gordon explains. “It’s really about the 1,700 other ships that were built there.

“When I was growing up nobody ever mentioned the Titanic. It was only in 1997 when director James Cameron made the movie that it finally became acceptable to talk about it at last. My father never talked about it. My grandfather never talked about it. It was a taboo subject because it sank. They were embarrassed about it. It was James Cameron that gave Belfast the permission to talk about it again by making a very famous film.”